Mdff Presents Short Stay

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Please join us on February 8th for the Toronto Premiere of SHORT STAY! Projected on 35mm with director Ted Fendt in attendance for a Q&A.

The MDFF PRESENTS series is programmed by a group of local filmmakers, writers and cinephiles dedicated to discovering and championing new cinematic voices. Tickets are $8 in advance ( link available soon!) or $10 at the door.

"This is slacker cinema for people who can't even be bothered to light a joint — in its own strange way a marvelous thing." — Calum Marsh, The Village Voice

"This stripped-down story of a less-than-dynamic man lets its gentle humor tip over into the excruciating again and again, functioning like a finely tuned moral tale whose tenderness for its characters doesn't mean it won't expose their shortcomings." — James Lattimer, Slant

"Short Stay does not feel like a bigger film than director Ted Fendt's charmingly ill-fitting shorts, but rather is a more robust, fuller in passing detail and commonplace incident. In other words: unassuming, but charged." — Daniel Kasman, MUBI Notebook

Multi-hyphenate Ted Fendt delivers on the promise of his acclaimed short films without sacrificing an ounce of his singular charm and rigor. Shooting on 16mm (blown up to 35mm), the writer-director-editor here focuses on Mike (Mike MacCherone), an ambitionless resident of Haddonfield, New Jersey, who finds himself subletting a friend’s room in Philadelphia and (ineptly) covering his shifts at a by-donation walking-tour company. Mike floats, as if in a trance, from one low-key comic folly to another, each one a strange and subtle moral tale. Fendt’s economy of expression, expert handling of his nonprofessional cast, and incomparable nose for the tragicomic dimension of the everyday distinguishes Short Stay as a truly anomalous work in contemporary American cinema: a film made entirely on its maker’s terms.